Category: News

Tuesday texts to read – 6

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Tuesday texts to read – 3

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Tuesday texts to read – 2

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Tuesday texts to read – 1

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Trying something new I’m trying, sharing a few different stories I’ve come across in the last week that I’ve found interesting or worth reading.

Positive Hitman Reviews

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It’s your classic story, man gets blackmailed for hush money, man takes extreme measures to not be exposed by hiring killers. Then because he’s a good internet citizen he leaves a review and eventually gets caught.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Maund, who is married, reached out to his ex, 33-year-old Holly Williams, about visiting on his upcoming trip to Nashville in February 2020. Upon hearing of the messages, Williams’ estranged boyfriend, 36-year-old William Lanway, allegedly messaged Maund asking for hush money and threatening to expose the relationship if it wasn’t received. A month later on March 12, 2020, Williams and Lanway were found dead at a Nashville construction site in a white 2005 Acura.

Maund allegedly hired three men to see the crime through: 47-year-old Gilad Peled, owner of Austin-based Speartip Security Services, 46-year-old Bryon Brockway and North Carolina native Adam Carey. Since the killings, both someone by the name of “Erik Maund” and Bryon Brockway left five-star reviews for Speartip.

Maybe the five-star review was a little premature.

Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Information Overload

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A bit of skepticism is a healthy thing. We should question motives, goals, and drivers in our leaders and in their policies. However, it seems like the sheer amount of information is stifling our ability to take in, process, and move through the chaff. News websites are run by a few different major news organizations and republish the same story with slightly different wordings across their network. Then you have the small time blogs (like this one) that publish stories as fact with little to no journalistic integrity. Those stories then get reposted on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook and “go viral” as a headline without the readers taking the time to read past the headline. So how does someone take in this deluge and not get completely steamrolled by too much information and how do they decipher what is news or opinion or simply information meant to incite some sort of innate emotion?

The first step is to look at how you find and consume news. Completely ignoring anything that is posted on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is a good start. Most of the “news” you will find there is a friend of a friend’s blog that is usually just a way for that person to vent (case in point, what you are reading right now is that). Sure, there are some actual news stories that get posted on Facebook but a lot of that stuff bubbles to the top because the news organization is trying to get as many eyes on it as possible and they will use headlines or graphics that are misleading to get a potential reader to click the link. Turning off the television is another great way to avoid hyperbole meant to grab your attention. Local news stations are good but remember that most are owned by a big news company. This isn’t to say that they are bad, you just need to know what lens they see the world through as you take in the information.

You can see where I am going. I like written news, whether it be print or online, I tend to get my news in written form from a number of different sources. To know which way the thing that I am reading leans, I use the media bias chart from ad fontes media.

Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart

Just from a quick glance I can tell that NBC and CBS skew a little to the left while The Hill and Wall Street Journal skew a little more to the right on the political spectrum. This doesn’t mean I discount or ignore what they say, it means I read each of them knowing that they tend to favor one side or the other.

My reading list for news is the following (in no particular order)

  • The Hill
  • The New York Times
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • NPR
  • Bloomberg
  • ZeroHedge
  • South China Morning Post

There are a few others that I will glance at including Real Clear Politics and The Atlantic but I try to spend as much of my time as close to the middle of that media bias chart as I can. Knowing that the New York Times is going to lean a little left on a story I can quickly look up the equivalent story in the Wall Street Journal and see what the right leaning thoughts are. This is particularly important when reading opinion pieces because again, these aren’t news, they are someone’s thoughts on a subject, they are going to lean one direction.

Critical Thinking Ignores Personal Bias

Maybe “ignores” is too strong of a word. Critical thinking softens personal bias. If all someone views is news and video stories about how antifa is setting the world ablaze, they are going to tend to think antifa is setting the world on fire, regardless if it is true or not. As a society, we should want as many well read people as possible. I want debates of issues but I want those debates focused on the issues, not the cruft that some news personality brought up. If more people read more opinions that don’t echo their own beliefs, we’ll be better for it. If more people know what is happening in the world, we’ll be better for it.

Part of what I see right now is hyper focus on a few domestic issues and those issues are surrounded by hyperbole and vitriol that actually adds very little to the conversation. It’s intention is to agitate the base on either side of the aisle enough to get them to repost on Facebook or Instagram and get more people agitated. We have to see through that.

Just removing vitriol is a huge first step. Abandon Facebook, or simply limit your time on it. Abandon Instagram, or at least avoid the politics cesspool part of it. Abandon Twitter, or start putting vitriolic posters on your muted list. If the yelling and noise doesn’t get constantly repeated eventually it will fizzle out and people can have debates with actual value and content. Knowing that we are being overloaded with information and disinformation is a good start.

The Covid Crisis in India

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From NPR:

India reported nearly 350,000 new cases on Sunday, more than any country on any day since the pandemic began, the fourth day in a row the country has broken that grim world record. Many worry case numbers are woefully undercounted since test kits are hard to come by, and hospitals are completely overrun.

Now cases and deaths have skyrocketed. Crematoriums are running day and night, unable to keep up with the bodies. There are desperate pleas for oxygen, hospital beds and medicine.

This is an unbelievable tragedy that is unfolding. I hope more countries step in to offer aid.

Mystery Colorado Drones

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Late in 2019 there were a number of reports around mystery drones flying over northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska. The origin of the drones remained a mystery for quite a while (and still does), but a bunch of research has given some insight into the concern around unidentified drones flying around the country.

Nevertheless, the documents already released suggest that the FAA, despite a short-lived, but strenuous effort, was unable to determine the origin of the flying formations of sizable aerial devices reported by many credible witnesses in December and January. Senior FAA officials were able, however, to conclude that “there is high confidence these are not covert military activities.”

The released documents contain no evidence that any federal criminal laws were broken by whoever was operating the devices, although the FAA has withheld at least one key document discussing the legal issues surrounding the case. No document yet released suggests that the mystery drones ever encroached on any U.S. military installation, or even into any airspace that was under special FAA restrictions.

So, although The War Zone and the SCU have pursued the Colorado drone flap for over half a year, we still don’t know who was behind the mysterious activity, and from what we’ve seen so far, no one in the Federal Aviation Administration knows either. It’s clear from these FOIA releases that the FAA, state and local authorities in Colorado, and even the AFOSI, took the sightings quite seriously, but it appears that their attention quickly shifted elsewhere once the public reports stopped.

It seems like whoever was behind the drone flyovers learned that there was a large investigation going on and soon stopped their shenanigans, but it still makes for a fascinating mystery. Based on the “space potatoes” that were found, I am wondering if it was some kind of crop health experiment or a agriculture company doing some kind of research. Again, we’ll likely never know unless the owners of the drones come forward.

Influencer shine begins to dull

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The “influencers” on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms who get paid to push products are starting to see their reach fade as COVID-19 continuestheir reach fade as COVID-19 continues.

For luxury influencers like Israel, it’s an opportunity to reflect on his industry.

“I’m trying to be very real at the moment,” he says, adding that he won’t buy any more Hermes bags this year.

Poor guy.

I have always been a bit grossed out by the influencer culture but the total tone deaf dialog in that article just confirms the sinking feeling in my stomach about the industry.